Virus- Are TBers being targeted??

Thanks for the warning!

Actually, that name sounds familiar. How were you sent the attachments - was the message something along the lines of "How are you? These are the figures I wanted you to look at.". I got sent something like that a month or two ago about four times.

Maybe someone is targeting us?

 

It's a conspiracy I tells ya!

~looks around in paranoia then runs away~

 

i am sick of all these viruses. frekin computer nerds with nothing better to do than make something that destroys anothers property. i have no use for those types of people. practically an act of terrorism if you ask me......

 

I got that same email. It was from someone called "Gary Lyka". I'm guessing that its a false name. The virus did infect my computer. It slowly infects important files, and you cannot clean these files once infected. They must be deleted and re-installed. If you do nothing about the virus (it doesn't crash your machine) it will start leaving obsene messages on your screen. And it will eventually disable most inportant fuctions that a computer has.

 

I got hit with a virus called the NIMDA virus, called that because it drops admin.dll files in the root of drives C,D,and E. It also drops .eml and .nws files all over your hardrive in addtion to attaching itself to every executable file that you have on your hard disk. Though the solution is a re-install, you would need to re-install every piece of software that you have on hard drive. I didn't have time to do that, but since I'm a software developer I dove into the virus code and figured out how to detach it from my executables using an application that I had previously written that catalogues files on my hard drive. Now I'm virus free.

 

Yep, that sounds like the one.

It might be someone who found your site here, unfortunately. 18,000+ people registered, and I'm sure plenty of people just lurk here... you know, it might be a bitter drummer!

Still, I'm right in thinking that the virus is harmless if you don't open the attachment, aren't I?

 

if i recall correctly, the virus automatically sends itself to everyone on the infected computer's email list. so it's not like someone's purposely trying to infect you.

 

SirCam Worm

This is the worm (virus) that Gabu is referring too.

It is a basically an attachment to an email that is actually a .exe or .bat file pretending to be a .doc file by hiding itself like this (whatever.doc.exe) hoping you would click on it.

The subject is a friendly one: How are you? And the body: I need some help.

The worm once activated emails itself out to everybody in your address book.

This worm can also collect email addresses from websites the infected computer visits - right off the pages from the net - so the user with the worm may be sending out infected emails without knowing about it.

The secret to avoiding infection: don't open attachments from emails. Or don't use Outlook Express.

More info:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/[email protected]

 

Thanks for the warning, but everything will be fine if you do not download, open or install anything from anyone you don't know. You should have no problems if you only read an e-mail. Be especially wary of anything with an .exe file extension, as this is an executable file and once you install it, you could be screwed!

EDIT: You may want to regularly delete your cookies. Cookies are what are used to track where you've been and what you're interested in. Not only could people use that info to target you with a virus, but that's how you get most of (if not all of) those junk e-mails you probably all get (I know I do).

 

Okay - just to clarify. There are a lot of misconceptions about cookies.

Cookies are text files that your browser downloads that lets the website store information about you, the visitor, on your computer. For example, here in TB if you use cookies, the cookie stores your username and password. A cookie can tell a website how many times you have been to the site. It CANNOT tell the website any other information, or read your hard disk etc. It is just a TEXT FILE.

You CANNOT get a virus because of cookies.

People CANNOT get your email address from a cookie on your computer - this is not where you get your junk mail from. Sometimes when you enter an email address on a site it is stored in a cookie, but the fact that you have entered it to the site means the site knows anyway. Other sites cannot get to that information.

Cookies can be used to build a profile of a visitor by storing the things that you do on a website eg. the links you click on, the things you buy - but this information you are giving to a website anyway - it cannot be obtained from another site or person. They are not as bad as they are made out to be. Cookies cannot store information that you do not give them.

People who are programmers can probably confirm this.

More info here:

The Unofficial Cookie FAQ

Cookie Central FAQ

 

Check out the first few passages of this site: http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/i-034.shtml, then scroll down to "Cookies and Buying Habits."

EDIT: Taken right from the site that Bass Guitar posted: "While cookies themselves are not gathering that data, they are, unfortunately, used as a tracking device to help the people who are gathering that information. As information is gathered about you, it is associated with the value they keep in your cookie."

And: "There is many ways in which you are traced on the web; cookies are seen more like a personal tag, some people see then as the most invasive of privacy. They are the only tracking device that we can control. Every time you log on to a web site you give away a lot of information: Service provider, operating system, browser type, screen resolution and amount of colors (only in IE), CPU type, your service provider's proxy server (if used), your IP address (again, this changes) and what server you were on last."

 

heck.. i get about 120 / 130 emails every day.. about 30 % of it contains a virus.. mostly the word-famous sir-cam with " Hi how are you, i sent you this file bla bla bla ", but my scanner filters out about 99 % of it..

if someone i don't know sends me an executable.. i delete it without second thought. if a close friend of mine sends me email that is not pgp-signed.. i delete it without second thought.. etc

( i'm security-advisor @ the company i work in.. it's my job to be paranoia )

 

Uh - Hategear - you give away all the information about ISP, OS, browser type, screen resolution WITHOUT cookies - cookies don't collect these information. These other info about your computer is obtained using other methods. Have you ever looked at server logs? This is another misconception about cookies.

You misunderstood that statement that you quoted - the author is saying that cookies are "personal tags" although some see them as invasion of privacy - however you can disable cookies, which are the "only tracking device you can control". When you visit every website, the website can get all sorts of information about your computer even WITHOUT cookies - these things you cannot generally control (unless you use proxy anonymous servers and disable scripts etc.)

Other sites that may clarify this for you:

http://www.tinhat.com/internet_privacy/webl_site_data_collection.html

http://www.masternewmedia.com/issue9/traffictrackers.htm

 

Thanks for the heads up guys!

 

PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, it means the mail is encrypted with a keyset..

there's the Private key and the Public Key.
You send your public key to all your friends.

If you make an e-mail and lock it with your Private Key, it can only be unlocked by the Public Key.

It has 1024 bit encryption, so it is considered virtually impossible to crack.

My friends always send me encrypted mail, for 2 reasons..

1) If i cannot unlock the mail, i know for sure that is wasn't my friend that sent it.

2)nobody but me and my friend know what was inside the mail.

get it ?

In America people are not too happy with this encryption, because of the NSA.. and we all know what the NSA does.. bad people.. bad !

 

Yes we are being targeted. This is what happens when drummers get to play on the computer too long...

 

I think it's the guys who sell the antivirus software who write most of the viruses.

"What? Sales are down for the quarter? Tell the Boys In The Back Room to start coding! We'll have those growth percentages up in no time..."